


in the low lamp light (I was free)

by mimosaeyes



Category: The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene, episode coda, for the anon meme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-25
Updated: 2017-09-25
Packaged: 2019-01-05 03:47:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12182298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimosaeyes/pseuds/mimosaeyes
Summary: The missing scene where Claire checks over Matt in the NYPD precinct. Fill forthis prompton the anon meme.





	in the low lamp light (I was free)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Work Song by Hozier, whose songs are uncannily suited to Matt and Claire in my opinion.

When they bring Matt in, and he’s lying on a stretcher unconscious and covered in blood, the first words Claire says are, “Why isn’t he in a hospital?” 

She has allowed them to take Jessica into an interrogation room, and has left Luke, after concluding that she can’t do anything for him, to be watched over by Colleen. Whatever this rag-tag group of heroes is — and she’s confronting facts here, not patronising or pitying him — Matt is the most breakable of them. He doesn’t have super-strength, or unbreakable skin, or a mystical glowing fist. He has to be her priority here; her first, the one she will always feel a certain connection to, separate from and bigger than ordinary ways of defining relationships.

Foggy is at her side, tension palpable in his expression and posture. His lips are a thin, set line, and he turns his head to follow Matt’s progress down the hallway.

The police officer following after the two paramedics bearing Matt on a stretcher gives her a brusque look, which softens when he recognises them as two of the people who have been here some time now under protective custody. He pauses to speak to them. “Unfortunately, he’s gotten tangled up in this mess with all these superpowered types. He’ll be safer here, ma’am. They did a preliminary assessment at the scene, but if you’re concerned, we can have a medic check him over more thoroughly here.”

“That’s not a good idea,” Foggy starts to say, before he can figure out a believable reason why. Automatically Claire knows what he’s thinking: that they can’t credibly account for most of the scars covering Matt’s body, let alone whatever fresh injuries he might have incurred in this most recent fight. Matt’s knuckles for example — any lesions that imply a blind man has successfully gone on the offensive will arouse suspicion.

Before the officer can take issue with Foggy’s input, Claire interjects. “I’m a nurse. Let me take a look at him. Your department’s swamped enough right now.”

The man deliberates only a moment before nodding. 

“Could we have a room?” Foggy asks, stopping him mid-stride with a tone of crisp authority reminiscent of the courtroom. “Preferably away from the bullpen. My friend is blind and can get overwhelmed or disoriented in new environments.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” the officer promises. As he calls out a room number to the paramedics, Foggy and Claire fall into step behind him and exchange glances. There is some truth to the reasoning Foggy has given for his request, but they also need to avoid a situation where Matt surfaces into consciousness and begins lashing out like a trained fighter in front of a bunch of people who might start asking questions.

The room they put Matt in has comfortable enough couches, although they both wince to think what Matt will make of the upholstery texture. While the paramedics transfer Matt from the stretcher onto a couch, their helpful officer disappears deeper into the precinct.

In the interim Claire finds herself crouching by Matt. Before she even consciously registers the impulse to, she’s smoothing her fingers over his soft hair. Just like that day in his apartment, when she walked away from him because she knew he would never stop. Because she knew his heroism, self-destructive as it is, would one day lead him here.

Distantly she’s aware of Foggy watching Matt, in helpless concern, or perhaps watching her with a kind of curiosity. Sighing, Claire draws back momentarily to pull on gloves from the kit left her by the paramedics, and look over her other supplies.

Finally the officer returns bearing an NYPD t-shirt. “We need his shirt for evidence. The blood,” he explains. “While you’re at it, could you…?”

“Sure thing,” Claire assures him, smiling her most professional and dazzling smile. Foggy accepts the t-shirt while with a pair of scissors, she cuts away Matt’s button-up.

The officer, of course, has to remain in the room for the sake of accountability. When Claire peels back the bloodstained fabric to reveal the cicatrix from that one vicious-looking slice near Matt’s left shoulder, she hears his quick intake of breath, halfway to a gasp. It does hardly look like the result of an accident. To a trained eye, there is violent intent in its position, its length and width. 

“What happened there?” he asks in puzzlement.

In her peripheral vision Foggy subtly positions himself so as to obstruct from view the worst of Matt’s scarred torso. “He lives alone and, you know, he can’t help being clumsy.”

Oh, the lies they have learned to tell so convincingly, for Matt’s sake. Foggy’s voice contains a precise, practised balance: genuine concern that reassures the officer he isn’t being negligent as a friend, resignation that stops any further questions in their track, and — if she’s being honest — a note of admonishment that the officer has not properly considered the implications of Matt’s blindness. Claire keeps her head bowed as she removes the shirt, glad her expression is hidden.

After bagging the tattered remains of Matt’s shirt, the officer nods at both of them and leaves, looking somewhat discomfited.

Once the door is shut and quietly locked behind him, Foggy exhales loudly. “I _hate_ playing the blind card.”

Claire’s quick to reassure him. “You did what you had to. It’s the most effective strategy.”

She can feel him hovering behind her and acknowledges him with a tilt of her head before focusing on her task. She first determines that Matt’s closer to asleep than unconscious — tricky to apply the Glasgow Coma Scale when his eyes categorically cannot be responsive, but she makes do.

With that crucial task complete, methodically, gently, she begins checking his ribs, his collarbone, all the important things holding him together. Those perpetually bruised and bloody knuckles. She can feel the warmth of his skin through the thin latex of her gloves. He always did run hot.

There’s a certain kind of intimacy between them, rooted in their history together, written into the very communion of their skin at each point of fleeting contact. After Claire has dispensed with the business of the bloodied shirt and first reaches out to touch him, part of her expects Matt to tense up, his training making him fight back instinctually.

But several beats pass, and her apprehensions are unfounded: he only lies still, and after a while the comforting thought occurs to her, that her touch might be familiar to him. That even subconsciously he knows it is a benevolent one, a world away from the violence he is normally subjected to. As though they have something like shared muscle memory, a tenuous mutual knowing.

She allows herself to linger over his breathing, his heartbeat. She remembers him saying how cracked ribs sound like an old ship, an inanimate creaking, and it takes her back to other times with Matt, other moments in dimness and soft tenderness.

They had one last encounter, after she told him she couldn’t love someone like him, someone so close to becoming everything he hated.

He did not go to her place; he was disciplined and ascetic that way, well-accustomed to depriving himself of what he needed, or wanted. Instead she found him vulnerable in an alley a couple of blocks away, disoriented by a lucky shot to the ears that set them ringing.

She suspects he may have had such a sensory blackout before. That did not make it any less frightening when he began yelling insensibly, striking the brick wall with his fist to ground himself in something, anything. His eyes wide and panic-stricken, until she caught hold of his wrist and all at once he stilled — he couldn’t hear her heartbeat just then, but perhaps he recognised the calluses on her fingertips, or the smell of the beeswax moisturiser she uses to protect her hands from the drying effects of continually sanitising them during her hospital shifts.

Inviting him in was hardly a choice. And then? And then nothing, really, but at the same time so much. She settled him in in her bed, and eventually lay down next to him to sleep till the morning, chaste as children and for that handful of hours, just as forgiving.

He left before she awoke, or he thought he did, or he pretended to himself that he did. She stirred ever so slightly, it could have been just shifting in her sleep, and she felt his palm, hot and flat, against her side, feeling her breathing. Her heartbeat must have picked up then, because he began to pull away from the point of contact, all Catholic guilt and self-deprecation.

She remembers nudging closer to him. She remembers allowing herself that much, in the low light and early morning stillness.

(“You have such quiet hands,” Matt told her once, exhaustion slurring the words. Sleepy, he aimed wrong for a kiss, his stubble a lovely tickle against her cheek and then the tip of her nose, his breath hot as he laughed softly and she guided him to her lips.)

“Is he okay?” Foggy asks, pulling her back into the present.

Claire hums before making her verdict. “As okay as he’s ever been.” She pulls her hand away from where it’s resting against Matt’s ribcage (protect his heart, protect his lungs, _ay Dios mío_ , keep him breathing; she wants to tell him he has kind, giving, hurt eyes, and that she is afraid, because _nothing gold can stay_ ). 

She snaps off her gloves. “Help me get this on him.” 

Between the two of them they manage to get Matt into the t-shirt, which is just short of too tight over his broad chest and muscular arms. It should feel awkward, but then the two of them have already seen Matt in various states of incapacitation. They ease him back down onto the couch.

Claire’s just thankful he’s not awake to witness any of it. He would hate appearing so helpless, having to be dressed like a doll, or invalid. 

Foggy must be thinking the same thing, because he jokes by way of distraction, “Just like old times, huh?” 

Really just a couple of times, and those times both involved much more serious injuries than Matt has sustained now. But Claire appreciates the attempt at humour, and cracks a smile, even if it belies what she says next.

“Wish it didn’t have to be. Wish I could’ve kept him from getting — sucked back into this.” Because she did try. It’s been a whirlwind, the last couple of days, but all along she has avoided mentioning Daredevil to the others, because he was trying to stop, she knows, and she also knows that if he were to fail, it might very well kill him. (It still could. She wants to keep him here, wants to get him put in police custody too, anything to stop this dread in the pit of her stomach, dread of an end that seems ever more inevitable.) 

Foggy’s brow furrows. “There was nothing you could’ve done,” he says, but uncertainly, like he’s not sure who he’s trying to convince, or rather who he’s really speaking to. Himself?

Subconsciously she has returned her fingers to the pulse point at Matt’s wrist, counting till fifteen seconds have passed and multiplying by four, distractedly, to get his heartrate.

Once again, as ever, she’s disciplined, allowing herself that much and no further. She lingers a moment longer, and then she says, “I need to go check on the other two.” 

She closes the door behind her, then leans back against it and thinks about going back in, staying till he wakes up.

But she knows she never did want to love Matt Murdock at arm’s length, and so she has only this: she holds his hand when he doesn’t know it. She remembers him breathing, his heart beating.

She leaves him behind and as the building crashes down, she puts her palms together and prays. 

She makes her heart amber and holds him in it, something precious and long dead.

**Author's Note:**

> I thought about making the officer Brett Mahoney, but I wanted to show Foggy being protective of Matt, so he had to play off a stranger.
> 
> I owe the line “nothing gold can stay” to Robert Frost, although I know it from S. E. Hinton’s _The Outsiders_ , wherein it becomes an allegory for the loss of innocence. After all, there is something prelapsarian about Matt and Claire’s relationship in Daredevil season 1.
> 
> If you like, you can show your support by reblogging my [tumblr post](http://mimosaeyes.tumblr.com/post/165741298787/fandom-the-defenders-title-in-the-low-lamp-light).


End file.
